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Franz Kafka

News about Franz Kafka, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

As an artist who willfully cultivated his own marginality, Franz Kafka became a symbol, to many, of the millions of people reeling from the political and cultural dislocations of the 20th century. And as an avant-garde artist who transformed the mysteries of his own identity into what his biographer Frederick R. Karl called a "tragic vision, leavened by wit, mockery and irony," he came to be regarded as both an exemplary modernist and a social prophet. The psychological complexities of his fiction paralleled the theories being expounded by his great contemporary, Freud, while his descriptions of modern man, caught in doubt, uncertainty and anguish, presaged the writings of the existentialists. Michiko Kakutani